Act Iii Spends $500,000 On Sound In Everett Theaters

The Everett 9 Cinemas, the latest multiplex from ACT III, will open today, just down the street from General Cinema's Everett Mall Cinemas.

Tim Wood, vice president of operations for ACT III, calls it "the best presentation in the Northwest. . . . Everything is luxurious and state-of-the-art." The theater most resembles ACT III's Crossroads in design, though the lobby and restrooms are even more brightly colored.

This is the first multiplex in the world to have all of its screens equipped with Lucasfilm's THX sound and the Dolby Stereo Digital Sound System. It cost approximately $500,000 just for the sound installations, including soundproofing between auditoriums.

At a Tuesday press preview, both sound and picture were stunningly clear during presentations of "Batman Returns" and "Aladdin." In addition to the first-run films opening this weekend, there will be free morning screenings to show off Dolby Digital prints.

Tomorrow only, "Batman Returns" plays at 9:50 a.m., "The Bodyguard" at 10:20 a.m. and "Under Siege" at 11 a.m. Passes may be picked up at Alexander's or Sound Advice on Everett Mall Way. Sunday only, Dolby Digital showings include "Sommersby" at 10 a.m. and "The Mighty Ducks" at 10:45 a.m. Passes are available at Olson's grocery stores.

-- The glory days of foreign films in the early 1960s live again at the Neptune, which is screening a flawless, new 35mm print of Federico Fellini's "8 1/2" tonight through Sunday, and Hiroshi Teshigahara's great "Woman in the Dunes" at 5 and 9:20 p.m. Monday.

One of the most influential movies made, Fellini's 1963 Oscar winner remains a surprisingly entertaining dramatization of the creative process, with Marcello Mastroianni playing a famous filmmaker who has run out of ideas for his next project.

Woody Allen, Bob Fosse, Francois Truffaut and Paul Mazursky all made films inspired by it. Perhaps the most blatant outright rip-off is the opening traffic-jam sequence in Joel Schumacher's "Falling Down." It may say something about the 30 intervening years that Fellini used this episode as the springboard for a Proustian flood of memory and fantasy, not a prelude to urban mayhem.

In the mid-1960s, "Woman in the Dunes" became the first Japanese movie to receive an Academy Award nomination for best director (even the legendary Akira Kurosawa had to wait until 1986 to be nominated for "Ran"). Teshigahara never equaled this erotic allegory about an entomologist trapped in a sand pit with a young widow, but if he'd never made another film he'd be remembered for this haunted masterpiece.

AROUND TOWN: At 7:30 and 9:30 tonight, the Pike St. Cinema, Pike and Boren, is screening a collection of short films about women, curated by local filmmaker Galen Young. Tomorrow at the same hours is "Salvador Dali Night," including "Un Chien Andalou" and the documentary "Pink Grapefruit." At 7:30 p.m. Sunday, the theater will screen G.W. Pabst's 1925 Greta Garbo classic "The Joyless Street" with live music. At 7:30 p.m. Thursday and next Friday, the theater also will play host to local filmmaker Bruce Bickford, who will bring a selection of his clay-animation shorts, including the astonishingly creative "Prometheus' Garden." Tickets are $5 except for the live-music show, which is $6. . . . At 8 o'clock tonight at 911 Media Arts Center, the Pinhole Cinema Project continues its retrospective of American avant-garde cinema with screenings of Michael Snow's "Wavelength," Bruce Conner's "Report" and George Landow's "Institutional Quality." At 8 p.m. Wednesday, 911 has scheduled its third annual screening of selected winners from the American Film Institute's "Visions of U.S." contest, including Kevin Adams' film about gay-bashing, "Can't Take That Away From Me"; Laura Johnson's "A Healing Process"; and "Limbo," by Vashon filmmakers Gabriel Judet-Weinshel and Aidan Fraser. Tickets are $3 for 911 members, $5 for others. . . . Soundtrack Cinema, 9 p.m. tomorrow on KING-FM (98.1), will feature Jerry Goldsmith's score for "Love Field" and Dominic Frontiere's music for Clint Eastwood's 1967 Western "Hang 'Em High." . . . The Globetrotter Travel-Adventure Film Series will screen Hal McClure's "Legends of England, Scotland and Wales" at 10:30 a.m., 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Crossroads Cinema. Tickets are $7. . . . Filming was completed yesterday on Frank Kostenko Jr.'s locally produced thriller, "Chrysalis," starring Michael Pare, Rick Aiello (son of Danny), Tim Quill, Martin Kove, Kent MacLachlan (brother of Kyle) and Renee Estevez (daughter of Martin Sheen and sister of Emilio Estevez).

OUT OF TOWN: Barbara Trent's Oscar-winning documentary, "The Panama Deception," returns Sunday through Wednesday to the Capitol Theater in Olympia, along with the Japanese animated film about Hiroshima "Barefoot Gen." Tickets are $3 for Olympia Film Society members, $5 for nonmembers. . . . San Francisco filmmaker Danny Plotnick is taking his "Kings of Super 8" program on the road, with Northwest stops scheduled at 9:15 p.m. Thursday at the Capitol in Olympia and at 8 p.m. next Friday at Seattle's 911 Media Arts Center. The program is made up of Super 8 videos, including Jim Sikora's "Love, After the Walls Close In," which is based on Charles Bukowski's short story "Reunion." . . . At the Broadway Center for the Performing Arts in Tacoma, the Rialto Film Guild is showing the late Richard Schmiechen's Oscar-winning 1984 documentary, "The Times of Harvey Milk," at 5:15 and 7:30 p.m. tonight and tomorrow (Schmiechen died April 7 of AIDS), and Paul Cox's "A Woman's Tale," an affecting 1992 account of an old woman's last days, at the same hours Thursday. Tickets are $5.